LinkedIn enters social-networking big league [Infographic]

Professionals everywhere have revived the once-ailingLinkedIn. Users once referred to the career-oriented social network as boring and lacking any real innovation. It seems however, that 2011 is LinkedIn’s year to shine. On Tuesday the site announced it had hit 100-million members, more than half of whom live outside the US.

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LinkedIn, which was launched in 2003 by Reid Hoffman, released an infographic (below) of its milestones, showing the social network has users in more than 200 countries. More than forty million of those LinkedIn users live in the US while the remaining 56-million are overseas. Brazil has the highest growth rate, with new user adoption rising a whopping 428% annually. Mexico has also seen major growth, with membership growing by a healthy 178% while India follows with 76% and France is growing by 72%.

Earlier this year, the social network filed for an initial public offering of stock. The company made a net profit of US$10-million on net revenue of US$161-million in the first nine months of 2010, according to the LinkedIn filing.

“We’re now growing at roughly one million new LinkedIn members every week, the equivalent of a professional joining the site at faster than one member per second,” LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner said in a blog post.

Weiner said LinkedIn’s ultimate goal is to “connect all of the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”.

“We’re most inspired that by connecting talent with opportunity at massive scale, we’re changing people’s lives in meaningful and sustainable ways. Each of our 100-million members has a unique story — from finding a job, to recruiting talent, to sourcing new deals, and even starting a business.”

According to the milestone infographic, nearly one million members of LinkedIn describe their job as “teachers”. There are now more than two million company pages, with eBay, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, EMC and Campbells as the most represented companies on the network based on the number of employees that are on the site.

In its S-1 filing for IPO LinkedIn conceded that “the number of our registered members is higher than the number of actual members, and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members”.

Though the company may have 100-million registered users only a third of those might be active. According to comScore, LinkedIn saw 71.5-million unique visitors worldwide in February. That is still 500-million less than Facebook which is now has 600-million users and 676.7 million unique visitors worldwide in February.

I have to say that I have taken a far more aggressive stance towards marketing via LinkedIn. In many ways it is a far better social network to use than Facebook or Twitter due to the fact that the people that are using the site are more likely to be interested in the web design, SEO and social media services that I can offer them.